Which highway became known as a major route for “okie” migration during the dust bowl years?

Abstract

A 2007 Zogby International Survey found that nearly one-third of Americans surveyed did not know enough about Oklahoma to form positive or negative opinions of the state. In order to explore what cultural heritage images of Oklahoma tourist sites convey to visitors, we assessed the information presented to tourists at museums and historic sites in the state astride U.S. Highway 66 (commonly referred to as Route 66). Four themes dominate interpretation at Route 66 historic sites. These locations suggest to tourists that the cultural heritage of Oklahoma is deeply rooted in its pioneer past, is based upon perseverance during regularly occurring trying times, is underlain by a passion for community cooperation, and is based upon the idea of mobility as a key to individual freedom. We conclude by reflecting on the ideas of Schöllmann et al. about the construction of heritage tourism sites and their application to Route 66.

Journal Information

The topics covered by Material Culture include all aspects of the study of material items from any world regional focus. These include: the role of products and commodities in the global economy, the cultural patterns that explain distribution and diffusion; exploration of cultural patterns in performing and visual arts; understanding tradition and innovation among individuals and the societies creating them; the meaning and importance of past and contemporary objects to their makers and users; attempts at restoring and maintaining folk and popular culture landscape elements; and the importance of understanding the relationships of material culture in the contemporary landscape. We welcome manuscripts from individuals interested in these subjects and encourage interested authors to discuss ideas with the Editor. Editor: Sara Beth Keough, Ph.D., Book Review Editor: Claire Jantz, Ph.D., Submission Guidelines: http://www.pioneeramerica.org/materialculturecurrent.html

Publisher Information

The International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture (formerly Pioneer America Society) is an international, interdisciplinary, educational, nonprofit organization that encourages the study and preservation of landscapes and artifacts, and documents sites, structures, and objects representing history and material culture throughout the world. Members include public servants, college faculty and students, private consultants, and preservationists, as well as interested lay persons. Chartered in 1967, The Society carries out its mission by identifying, documenting, analyzing, and interpreting significant cultural landscapes, architecture and artifacts, and by encouraging educational programs, scholarly research, and preservation. Over the years, The Society has expanded its views and focus.

Eight decades ago hordes of migrants poured into California in search of a place to live and work. But those refugees weren’t from other countries, they were Americans and former inhabitants of the Great Plains and the Midwest who had lost their homes and livelihoods in the Dust Bowl.

Years of severe drought had ravaged millions of acres of farmland. Many migrants were enticed by flyers advertising jobs picking crops, according to the Library of Congress. And even though they were American-born, the Dust Bowl migrants still were viewed as intruders by many in California, who saw them as competing with longtime residents for work, which was hard to come by during the Great Depression. Others considered them parasites who would depend on government relief. 

As many of the migrants languished in poverty in camps on the outskirts of California communities, some locals warned that the newcomers would spread disease and crime. They advocated harsh measures to keep migrants out or send them back home.

Migrants Fled Widespread Drought in Midwest

The Dust Bowl that forced many families on the road wasn’t just caused by winds lifting the topsoil. Severe drought was widespread in the mid-1930s, says James N. Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington and author of the book American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California.

“Farm communities in the larger region were also hurt by falling cotton prices. All of this contributed to what has become known as the Dust Bowl migration,” Gregory says.

The exact number of Dust Bowl refugees remains a matter of controversy, but by some estimates, as many as 400,000 migrants headed west to California during the 1930s, according to Christy Gavin and Garth Milam, writing in California State University, Bakersfield’s Dust Bowl Migration Archives.

Dust Bowl migrants squeezed into trucks and jalopies—beat-up old cars—laden with their meager possessions and headed west, many taking the old U.S. Highway 66.

“Dad bought a truck to bring what we could,” recalled one former migrant, Byrd Monford Morgan, in a 1981 oral history interview. “There were fifteen people to ride out in this truck, in addition to what we could haul”—including the family’s kitchen table, sewing machines, sacks to use in picking cotton, and five-gallon cans packed with cookies baked by Morgan’s stepmother. Along the way, the family camped out by the side of the highway.

When the family got to California, they stopped at farms and asked if they needed workers, and picked everything from tomatoes to grapes, Morgan said.

More people from the drought-ravaged plains actually settled in the Los Angeles area than in the San Joaquin Valley and other agricultural areas in California, according to Gregory. But migrants made up a bigger percentage of the population in the state's rural areas, and it was there that journalists recorded the dire poverty and desperation that John Steinbeck described in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Police Officers Tried to Block Migrants at the Border

As the migrants’ numbers swelled, efforts were made to thwart the migration. Police officers sometimes met migrants at the state line and told them to go away, because there was no work, in what was called the “bum blockade.” Officers stopped one mother with six children at a checkpoint and demanded that she pay $3 for a California driver’s license, though they relented when she said that she only had $3.40 to her name and needed that money to buy food for her family, according to a L.A. Times account.

Those who got into California often found themselves continually on the move from farm field to farm field in search of work. They lived in spartan quarters provided by agricultural growers or squatted in “Hooverville” shanties on the outskirts of towns, before the federal government started setting up migrant camps to accommodate them, according to the U.S. National Archives.

“Yes, we ramble and we roam, and the highway that’s our home,” folk singer Woody Guthrie sang in “Dust Bowl Refugee.”

Californians derided the newcomers as “hillbillies,” “fruit tramps” and other names, but “Okie”—a term applied to migrants regardless of what state they came from—was the one that seemed to stick, according to historian Michael L. Cooper’s account in Dust to Eat: Drought and Depression in the 1930s. One California businessman described the newcomers as “ignorant, filthy people,” who should not “think they’re as good as the next man.”

Some warned that the newcomers would sponge off the government, although relatively few of them actually sought benefits, as State Relief Administration director Harold Pomeroy explained in a 1937 Desert Sun article.

Migrants Were Feared as a Health Threat

A local official in Madera, California complained in 1938 that the migrants crowded into the camps presented a health threat, noting that “these conditions are not to be blamed o the growers, but on the people themselves, [for] having lived in squalor for many generations” back in their home states. One riverbank shantytown that was home to 1,500 migrants was burned to the ground by disease-fearing Californians in 1936.

Ironically, it would be a war—World War II—that would finally boost migrants’ fortunes. Many families left farm fields to move to Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, where they found work in shipyards and aircraft factories that were gearing up to supply the war effort.

By 1950, only about 25 percent of the original Dust Bowl migrants were still working the fields. As the the former migrants became more prosperous, they blended into the California population.

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What was the Okie migration?